


cold as numbers

by alderations



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: (ivy flavor), Amnesia, Angst, Character Study, Domestic, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:20:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26151025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alderations/pseuds/alderations
Summary: Ivy starts at the beginning.Every morning, Ivy starts at the beginning. Rubbing alcohol, scalpel blades, sensations that should be twisting and cutting and crushing, if the words could coalesce into feelings. A subdued voice, a cool hand on her forehead. She is Ivy Alexandria. She starts at the beginning.(Mechs Femslash Week Day 4: Angst)
Relationships: Ivy Alexandria/Raphaella la Cognizi
Comments: 9
Kudos: 49
Collections: Mechanisms Femslash Week 2020





	cold as numbers

Ivy starts at the beginning.

Every morning, Ivy starts at the beginning. Rubbing alcohol, scalpel blades, sensations that should be twisting and cutting and crushing, if the words could coalesce into feelings. A subdued voice, a cool hand on her forehead. She is Ivy Alexandria. She starts at the beginning.

There’s a space for the beginning, though she notes, as she moves on, that it’s not a space she accesses often. Outside of the mornings, of course. It’s a door that closes behind her, and the next thing she knows is that it’s  _ not  _ the beginning, it was never the beginning, but before that—

_ no data. _

Heading in the other direction, she has only the Mechanisms and the endless, interwoven string of calamities that they precede. Whether they  _ cause  _ such disasters—the data aren’t clear, and it seems to vary from case to case, but Ivy can generally conclude that there are enough people in the universe (other than themselves) who are more than willing to stake their lives on death and destruction, so they don’t need to do more than lift a finger to turn the tide. In her mind, she combs through millennia of these stories, those they sing about, those they  _ speak  _ about, and those best left to the dead. The nine of them fill the interludes, safe within the Aurora’s walls except for when they inevitably hurt each other. Usually the wounds are physical, though Ivy finds records here and there of interactions that she knows, with all the certainty of peer-reviewed research, not to touch. When her emotions trickle down from the monolith of raw data, they come first as sequences, extrapolations based on the information she has and the connections her brain says to make.

_ if(octokitten = present) { _

_ happy _

_ } _

That’s just one of thousands, swelling from a trickle to a flood, but all that this moment’s Ivy feels is the calm elation of waking up in a new place and greeting a morning that she’s never  _ felt  _ before. Morning means breakfast, she knows, so she follows the floor plan in her head and the exhilaration in her fingertips as she takes everything in. Again.

In the kitchen doorway, shafts of light spill into geometric patterns on the floor, broken and refracted by radiant metal feathers as if the composition of the scene were intentional.  _ Raphaella la Cognizi,  _ she supplies to herself, like an entry in an encyclopedia.  _ Science officer of the spaceship Aurora. You are in love with her. _

That detail makes Ivy pause.

She can conjure millions of moments in her long coexistence with Raphaella—dates they’ve been on, people they’ve killed for one another, the exact length in inches  _ and _ centimeters of the straw-blonde hair that spilled over Ivy’s shoulder the first time she saw Raphaella cry—but the emotions that should accompany them, the logical conclusions of those moments, are absent. Her brain tells her that she is in love. Her memories tell her that she has  _ been  _ loved. And right now, watching Raphaella sing an encouraging tune to their fickle coffee maker, she is looking at a stranger.

When Raphaella turns and sees her,  _ smiles  _ at her, Ivy can understand how quickly the gaps fill in. Her brain isn’t made to handle that kind of metadata, once she starts asking  _ how long will it take for my memories to catch up to my memories to catch up to my feelings,  _ but her physiological reactions are saying that it won’t be all that long. “Good morning, sleepyhead,” Raphaella chirps, and Ivy’s heart flutters in her throat.

“Good morning,” she answers. That’s all she can manage right now.

The data are not kind enough to exclude everything Ivy would like to ignore. They remind her, in no uncertain terms, that this woman she ostensibly loves is dangerous, murderous, callous about everyone who can’t further her own learning, sometimes including Ivy. They remind her that the two of them have committed atrocities together, hand in hand. Her libraries are full of musings on morality, and she can read between the lines better than most: is this what she should love? Eyes wide and bloodshot from a late night in the lab, clinging to a comically large mug of overbrewed coffee, smiling with a fox’s teeth and wings she affixed to her own back so that time could never keep her from knowing  _ more? _

Raphaella squeaks when she yawns, one hand barely covering her mouth, and that’s all the answer Ivy needs.

“You want tea? The kettle’s already full, I just have to turn it on.” She waits for Ivy to nod, scanning her face with eyes as welcoming as the sea, lips parted as if she’s already thinking about how it would feel to kiss her. So, yes, the data support the idea that Raphaella has loved her just as fully.

The question remains, then, whether Raphaella  _ understands. _

She knows that Ivy loves her, because she’s said as much in a thousand different ways over the centuries, and because anyone with a mind as scientific as hers should be able to piece together the signs and symptoms. And there have been mornings, though few, where Ivy has woken up in Raphaella’s arms, struggling to recall the face looking down at her with concern and saying  _ you had a nightmare again.  _ They’ve talked about everything in their time together, so Raphaella knows that Ivy is experiencing the universe anew every day, and that—logically—every morning’s Ivy has never met Raphaella la Cognizi before.

There’s a significant part of Ivy that says she can’t be in love. The moments when her pulse races and her pupils dilate and her hands grow hot are moments that she  _ feels,  _ but how can she be in love with a dataset? How can she love this woman when her brain reminds her, anecdotally and with very firm calculations, that she will be the literal death of her time and time again? How can Raphaella love her back when they both know, in perfect clarity, that Ivy will never remember the feeling of loving her when the moment has passed?

Ivy has run this metaanalysis every morning for thousands of years now, and every morning the numbers are different. Maybe she’s making adjustments to the data, picking what she wants to include and ignore based on her mood, or maybe Raphaella herself changes enough from one day to the next that the results never stay the same. It doesn’t matter. Today, Raphaella loves Ivy, and there is a 32% chance that she understands the pathways and circuits that Ivy has to wander to love her back.

And, like every morning before, Ivy doesn’t say anything.

**Author's Note:**

> this was like 80% vent piece honestly. my own memory works a lot like Ivy's in certain ways, and the more I think about Ivy's actual day-to-day life and her interactions with the crew, the more it hurts. so. sorry Ivy.
> 
> if you made it this far, I hope you enjoyed/survived my flowery ass Sad Writing. There's a reason I usually lean so heavily on dialogue :') otherwise THIS happens. Anyway, I got scheduled to work tomorrow at the last minute, so comment so I have some metaphorical sugar water to sip on like a sad little hummingbird while I deal with c*stomers? I might... also... be posting something smutty in like 30 minutes... because I have never Chilled The Fuck Out ever in my life. I would apologize for clogging the mechs tag with my nonsense, but currently if you go to my profile the first fandom listed is Overwatch and I really can't have that on my conscience. I hope you can all understand.
> 
> thanks for reading <3


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